


Between A Rock

by SereneJellyfish



Category: Original Work
Genre: Body Modification, Bounty Hunters, Chases, Class Differences, Corporate Espionage, Corruption, Cybernetics, Cyberpunk (genre), Cyborgs, Europe, Evil Corporations, F/M, Future, Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Language, Private Investigators, Technobabble, Technology
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-01
Updated: 2019-11-01
Packaged: 2021-01-15 23:42:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21261560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SereneJellyfish/pseuds/SereneJellyfish
Summary: In far-future Europe when governmental bodies are just a front for massive corporations and class divides have grown so extreme as to make each layer of the city lean away from the other, the world has fallen into a complex network of lies, contracts and dependencies. Aura Juvan, a P.I. for Blue-6 security firm is handed a job that will change the course of her own fate--and send shockwaves through the world she inhabits.





	Between A Rock

# Between A Rock

### The Contract

The second set of screaming sirens should have tipped her off. One set of cruisers was just a typical Monday. Two was a coincidence. Three? Three was a problem. Usually a big one. Given the direction they’d been flying and the speed that last pair was pulling as they wove between the rest of the mid-tier traffic she was guessing that they’d lost the skip she’d just turned in. Again.

“Dumb fuckers,” the woman muttered under her breath, betting that the green looking Eurosec agent she’d handed her mark over to hadn’t even bothered to cuff the man she’d just brought them. They probably hadn’t even made it back to the station before Petrov had given the agents the slip.

She could almost see it in her mind’s eye. The man was an eel; slippery as sin and twice as vicious. He’d leapt off the back of her own Astra-flight bike just five days ago at nearly two klicks an hour as she was shifting from mid-tier to top in the merchant district of West-Slov. Even with modifications, most humans would have simply left a six metre long stain of blood and whatever their favourite brand of jump-juice was all over the filthy ground before breathing their last. Not this one, though. He’d hit the ground in a roll and kept right on moving. Leaving a nice little trail for her to follow while she cursed up a storm. It had taken her three more days to re-catch Petrov and she’d had to keep him knocked out to get him delivered in the end.

Aura Juvan didn’t much like the implication that this was going to come back on her head. She’d marked him delivered in her own logs, but if they hadn’t clocked Petrov at the station, it would show as a failure to book. Juvan had a problem with that.

Decision made, the woman toed the propulsion controls for her Astra and pulled an illegal flip into the southbound stream, coming up wedged between a public transport pod and an open-top coupe. The Astra barely fit into the legally required two metre clearance between the other two vehicles and likely set off the proximity alarms on both, but she didn’t stick around to find out, flooring the pedal under her foot while her thumb engaged the dynamic shielding. The Astra leapt forward like a startled stallion and the chase was on, the woman gaining ground on the third pair of cruisers with an alarming disregard for traffic law.

Aura was speed personified, on the bike and off it. Born in the dock district of lower Pula, she’d clawed her way out of gutter life by way of the racing circuit in Neo Montenegro before it had crumbled into a rigged, corporate VIP playground. Her teenage years had been spent working her way up the amateur rankings with her eye set on sliding straight into the pro circuits. She’d been the one to watch, or so everyone had said at the time. Until Nagata had bought out the whole place and contracted all the racers directly to their own subsidiaries.

She’d been nineteen and it had seemed like a dream come true. Stuck her thumbprint on the dotted line like a naive little girl, not realizing that she was also signing away her right to fair competition. Oh, it had started out fine. Great, even! Nagata had paid to have all their drivers enhanced with top of the line reflex mods and vis-aids. The good shit that leaves you looking like a proper organic with just a few trace lines in your flesh here and there. She’d been handed the latest and greatest toys they could get their hands on, ones that had their speed caps cracked and could pull a roll at four-hundred without blowing apart. Aura Juvan had been flying high on the good life—for all of six months. Until they’d ordered her to lose. On purpose.

Refusing had been a bad idea. Doing so twice got her into more trouble than she’d ever have thought possible. They’d come after her mods, knowing that she’d signed over the right to claim them as her own. Technically, they were loaned out to her and she’d have to pay them off. Nagata wasn't about to let her do that at the circuit—not after the stunts she’d pulled.

They dumped her ass into one of their small partner companies, knowing that she’d never dig herself out of the financial hole she was in; Blue-6 was a Bail, Bond and Security company. It had been a shit-hole when she’d started there almost twenty years ago and it still looked every inch the dive if you visited their original location in lower-mid Zagreb. The old building it squatted in was butted up against the red-light district, cozied right up to the local whores and the jump-juice dealers. About five years ago they’d opened a satellite location in upper Zagreb, just a year after the Owler-Nagata merger. It had been a good year for Blue-6 as they’d pulled in extra jobs from both of the major corps and a few outside as well. It was in Owler-Nagata’s best interest to keep the security firm in their pocket to help them clean up the dirtier side of business transactions.

Aura had long since learned not to ask. What her marks had done and why they were being collected was irrelevant. When your employer had you by the balls, you simply asked “how high” and jumped. It was either that or have half her skeletal system yanked out of her body and her eyes repossessed.

The Astra howled past the second set of Eurosec cruisers, a ridiculously cheerful chime on her condensed dash telling her they’d registered her bike’s beacon, likely marking her for speeding and reckless use of manual control. Little did they know that Aura’d had her auto-flight all but disabled, the little light by her left hand permanently on in a bald-faced lie. Another chime, this one from her overlay as a call came through from her employer, confirming that Eurosec had just posted another ticket with her name on it.

“Juvan, ‘the fuck is going on?”

Verna’s gravelly voice came through the audio tie-in embedded just behind Aura’s left ear.

“Now’s not a good time Verna—“ Juvan grimaced, narrowly missing an incoming cargo barge as she squeezed between two transport pods. “—I think Petrov gave Eurosec the slip before they got him back to a holding station.”

There was an exasperated sigh from the other end of the comm before Verna replied, “That’s the second time in six months. Let them handle it.”

“You know they’ll pin it on us—“

“I’ll handle it. Just like I’m handling this fucking speeding fine right now, and just like you’re going to handle this job I’m sending to you.”

Verna’s irritated voice was muffled by the interference of the incoming files, each of them chiming their way into Aura’s visual interface as a cluster of little glowing dots in her peripheral vision. Much of the rest of Verna’s call was another lecture on Aura’s disregard for speed caps and proximity limits, all of which she tuned out while she cycled the engine down into a more appropriate speed bracket, gradually dropping from the fast lanes downward until she found a place to pull clear of the main traffic.

“Wait, what?” Verna had said something important and Aura had almost missed it. “You’re partnering me with someone from outside? We’ve got plenty of our own muscle. What gives?”

“So you can watch the asshole and find out what makes him tick; Or rather what makes Pinkwater tick.”

“Ugh, really?”

“Yes, really. And no, Mouradi isn’t taking this one. He’s too much in the spotlight right now and we need someone less public. Less known.”

“Nice, Verna. Real nice…”

It was no secret that Juvan didn’t like the high profile cases. The first few years she’d spent at Blue-6 had resulted in long rashes of the tabloid boards flashing her image as a fallen-from-grace washout that had gone from a successful career to mopping up the district’s local scumbags. It had left something of an impression and she’d preferred taking the jobs that were inherently kept quiet. Often the ones that benefitted Nagata—and no one else. The kind that never made it to the newsfeed, much less the tabloid boards.

“Keep this one quiet, Aura.” It was serious business now. Verna was using her first name and it sharpened the younger woman’s focus to a laser point. “Your partner is an unknown. Their firm is falling like a barge without anti-grav and we don’t know if they’re going to take the scrutiny personally. The contract and the report on Pinkwater are both to be silent.” Verna meant off the official record, and Aura knew it. It also meant the payout would be large and the work would likely be difficult. The two always went hand in hand.

“Understood.”

The call ended abruptly, the two women long past the point of needing pleasantries to pad out their communication and Aura far too curious about the files that had just been slipped her way. For the first time in months, she actually engaged the auto flight system on the Astra, letting the bike drift out into the slow lane and catch up with the rest of the commuters as she poured over the contract itself. Tracking down missing persons was common in her line of work. Catching them too. It was the public nature of the names involved that worried her most. A runaway corporate heir that was to be brought in without the media catching wind would be tough enough; Doing it while babysitting a partner she’d never met was going to push this into crazy-town and she knew it. All she had was a name, a contact code and a sinking feeling in her gut that said this was probably going to be one of those days…

The message Aura sent to Buchanon’s contact code left in the form of an audio file, her voice laid over the background din of traffic. It was short and to the point; almost curt. It was very clear by her tone that this was not a meeting she was particularly looking forward to. There was no greeting, and no farewell. Just the facts.

“Aura. Meet me at the Cock & Kitten, Lower South side of the shipping quarter in Vienna.” It wasn’t a friendly looking area, but chances were good that like herself he was used to frequenting the dirtier side of life. “Coords on their way if you need ‘em. ETA Two point three hours”

* * *

The place itself was an absolute dive and at this time of the morning there were only four vehicles lined up in the bay; one empty cargo hauler, two rusted out sedans and a vivid-violet Astra at the far end of the row as if its owner didn’t want their hoverbike to “catch” anything contagious from the flyers parked there. The scene inside wasn’t all that different. A handful of patrons were lined up along the bar, nursing the poison of their choice and the only woman in the joint was sitting in the farthest booth from the door, her back to the wall so she could keep an eye on both sets of doors.

The man who stepped through the entrance was just about what Juvan was expecting. The single image that Pinkwater had attached to his file had showed a rough looking, heavily scarred middle-aged male that had clearly seen a little too much of life and quite possibly a little too much of the local body-fixer—what the general public called the barely legal, low cost surgeons who offered cheap modifications and boosters. Pinkwater’s report had included far more information than Aura Juvan would normally have expected and she’d understood that the sudden access to full records probably meant some kind of political manoeuvring. In the two hours it had taken for her auto-flight system to bring her to the Cock & Kitten she had managed to read through every professional reprimand on the man’s record. There were an awful lot of them for a man who’d spent so many years at the same firm. What she’d found most interesting was that the majority of them had come from earlier in his career. A sharp drop-off in the amount of behavioural records like that indicated he’d either stopped pushing back or his employers had given up trying to curb the quirks of his personality.

She watched the hardened P.I. shake water from his jacket as he stepped into the vestibule, turning the thought over in her active consciousness, wondering if he was going to make this job harder or easier. She’d had aggressive partners in the past; Some of them had even been good. Judgement though would come later, the woman too well seasoned to make those kind of assumptions off the top. 

**Author's Note:**

> I have not uploaded things onto AO3 before. 
> 
> I have never attempted anything quite like this before, actually.
> 
> This began as a tale plotted out between myself and an RP partner that never quite took off but the story just won't let me go and I find myself returning to it again and again. My hope is that perhaps someone out there somewhere might enjoy it.
> 
> Comments are welcome!


End file.
